To fabricate a dental prosthesis for a patient, a dental impression of a dentition of the patient is required. At present, a sequence of steps is followed to obtain the dental impression. The impression of prepared teeth such as maxillary teeth or mandibular teeth of a desired dental arch is obtained. The impression of the opposing dental arch is then obtained. A bite registration is then fabricated to interdigitate each impression to enable a dental practitioner to fabricate the dental prosthesis. During this procedure, a dental practitioner must perform retraction of free tissues such as tongue, cheek, lips, etc., retraction of attached tissues such as gingival margins around an individual tooth, control of moisture, saliva, blood, etc., and monitor the patient to prevent gagging. Performing each of these functions sequentially is time consuming and difficult.
Although, current impression devices allow a dental practitioner to capture both the dental arches at once, these devices lack techniques or construction to manage the free tissues, the attached tissues, and/or the moisture contaminants of an oral cavity. Current practices involve auxiliary steps for the management of tissues, for example, mechanical retraction, altered tissue dynamics using laser, electrosurge, etc., or chemical alteration. Hence, there is a need for an apparatus that expedites the procedure for obtaining a dental impression by minimizing the sequence of steps currently followed. There is also a need for an apparatus that effectively employs dental impression materials around the teeth of interest for obtaining an accurate dental impression of the patient.
Therefore, there is a long felt but unresolved need for a dental impression apparatus that accurately obtains a dental impression of a patient with a minimum number of steps. Furthermore, there is a need for a dental impression apparatus that effectively employs the dental impression materials to accurately obtain the dental impression of the patient, while preventing contamination of the dental impression by moisture, saliva, blood, etc.